by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this episode of Creative Status, Constantin Bo Morun and I dive deep into the transformative experience of cultivating a growth mindset and becoming more real.
Constantin is the host of the UNLEASH THYSELF podcast and has spent the past few years on an introspective, insight-collecting mission as he’s delved into his own ‘stuff’, cleared his fixed ideas of himself and life out of the way, and stepped into the process of growing and expanding into wholeness a little more every day.
This is a really potent conversation thanks to Constantin’s candid and authentic ability to speak with zest and passion about the observations he’s made on this journey and the practical steps we can all take in our lives based on what he’s learned.
If you’re going through a transformative period yourself or if you simply want more insights and ideas about how you can be even more of yourself in a REAL way then check out this episode!
Thanks a bunch,
Oli
(Scroll down for show transcript)
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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus
Episode Links:
Unleash Thyself website: https://unleashthyself.com
Unleash Thyself on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7a4YLmJoGTuwH695uUGB4C
Constantin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/constantin-bo-morun/
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
Show Transcript: Unleash Thyself & Grow REAL
Intro
Oli Anderson: Hi there, Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. I’m a creative performance coach.
I help people bring realness into their lives and businesses using creativity as a vehicle to integrate the truth about themselves so they can be more connected to who they really are, their true values and intentions, more connected to other people in a deep, meaningful way, and more connected to life itself through a sense of purpose that connects them to everything they might want to connect to so they can keep flowing and growing and evolving and doing the things that human beings are designed to do. Every episode of the podcast I interview someone who has something to say about all this. Today I am talking to Constantin Morun from the Unleash Thyself podcast.
That’s awesome and definitely worth checking out if you’re into the kind of thing that this podcast is about. But anyway, this is a really powerful conversation. If I may use the word powerful to describe it. We talk about the transformational process in general. Some of the things that people might face as they go through a transformative journey into wholeness or realness as I always talk about it. Constantin shares some of his own experience. He’s been on a journey over the last few years.
He’s very candid and able to encapsulate wisdom through insights that are very, very useful and practical. So anyway, we’re running run and rave too much. But here’s the interview. Constantin, thank you so much for your time. Everyone else, thanks for listening. See you next Monday for another episode. And hope you enjoy this. Here we go.
Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Constantin. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status.
You are a man after my own heart. You’re very interested in the transformational process that human beings can take themselves through if they want to become more authentic or more real. You have a podcast yourself called Unleash Thyself.
And ultimately, I think we’re going to explore a lot of those themes around transformation in this conversation. Before I start asking you six million different questions, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people why you ended up on this path or how you ended up on this path in the first place and what you want to get out of this conversation?
Constantin Bo Morun: Absolutely. Oli, thanks for the awesome introduction as well. And thank you for having me on the show.
And thank you to the audience for tuning in to another amazing episode. So where do I begin? I’ll tell you what I am right now and how I got here.
So right now today, you’ll find me, as you mentioned, as the host of the Unleash Thyself podcast, where the mission is to inspire and empower listeners on this beautiful journey that we call life. Now, I’m also a professional in the corporate world. I’ve been with Microsoft Canada for about six years now.
And I specialize in artificial intelligence and technology on this side. And in my personal life, I just enjoy playing soccer, spending time with my dogs and my partner, and just enjoying life. And even though I have so many priorities these days, and you could say, you know, there are days when I work 12, 16 hours, it doesn’t feel like work anymore.
Why? Because I have come to the conclusion that if you do what you love, and you find ways to bring what you love into your, let’s say, corporate job like in my case with Microsoft, or every other aspect of your life, then every day will be a joy and filled with fulfillment. Now, it doesn’t get every day will be perfect, because I still have days when I may feel down or I may feel more sad than others. But on average, I have more good days than bad. That’s what I am today.
Oli Anderson: That’s amazing. So how did you put yourself on this path in the first place? Like, did something happen to kind of wake you up? Or to raise your awareness and you started to realize that, okay, I need to bring more of my real self into my life. If that’s if you did, like what was going on for you then?
And what changes did you start making?
Constantin Bo Morun: That’s a great question. Only there. Let me go back a bit. So I was born in Eastern Europe, Romania. And at the time when I was born, it was still a communist country.
And I grew up with my parents, but also my grandparents had a big part in raising me. So as you can imagine, people that were born in the 20s, the 30s, and then later in the 50s and 60s had a big influence in my life. And this goes, you know, beyond just my immediate family, but also teachers, caregivers, because those were very tough times, and there were different ways of living. I had different imprints on me from a very young age. A lot of limiting beliefs, a lot of, let’s call them fixed mindset approaches to life.
And I’ll explain that later. But this carried over into my teenage years and adult life. I moved to Canada, so to North America when I was 17. And, you know, I put my soul into studying because we finally had an opportunity to really chase its American dream. And I went to university, like all people would do here, and even in Romania, my parents were both engineers. So I followed in their footsteps, went to engineering, and then I went to mathematics and eventually got a mathematics and computer science degree. And then I did a bunch of things, right? I went into entrepreneurial adventures and also into the corporate world.
I kind of doubled into everything, see what I like. But here’s the thing, and the reason I went that far back with the story, because of those limiting beliefs, because of everything I’ve learned when I was younger, I wasn’t actually giving myself permission to be me, to be truly constant into who’s under, you know, the surface. And the reason being is that the way I grew up, it wasn’t okay to be you, because people would judge you.
It wasn’t okay to be joyful and playful and artistic or cry as a boy or show any type of weakness, because again, that was seen as less than, and they would reflect poorly on you, your family, based on the culture. I didn’t give it much thought when I went through these phases in my late teens and then in my twenties and even in my early thirties. It wasn’t until I joined Microsoft actually around when I was about 34, 35, six years ago.
And I stumbled upon this new culture that they were promoting around growth mindset. And the idea of growth mindset is pretty simple. You’re looking at everything that happens in your life as an opportunity to grow. So if you make a mistake, right, if you do anything that you’re not happy with, it’s not that you want to hide it anymore, to ignore it or to be like, I don’t want to look at it, it makes me cringe, but more to approach it from a scenario where, hey, you know, it didn’t work out the way I was expecting it or hoping that it would work out. But I can take out lessons from it and then iterate on it and hopefully do better next time.
And then that took me for a good spin because again, it was conflicting with some of the lessons I have learned in my life and I was taking for granted. And I would say my full transformation began about six years ago and then it really went to the next level last year around.
So when I say last year, it’s 2022, spring of 2022 is when it really got elevated. And we can chat more about that if that interest you, but that’s kind of to give you a bit of a story of how it starts. And the reason I mentioned this as well is because people will see me today that like, wow, I can’t believe how much it changed overnight. But there is no such thing as an overnight change, right? No, as it appears overnight, because you may talk to people for a you know, every month or every three months, every six months, and they’ll notice a change and be like, oh, wow, that happened overnight. But it’s like years in the work, right? Years and months.
Oli: Yeah. I think it’s a gradual thing. But then eventually we kind of reach a tipping point where there’s no turning back because we’ve basically got to the point where we’ve realized that a lot of the beliefs we were holding on to a lot of the assumptions we were living our lives according to a lot of the images and concepts that we carried of who we think we were, we were always supposed to be. We realized that that stuff was unreal.
And once you grasp that just one of those beliefs is unreal, well, you can apply that logic to all of those beliefs because they’re all unreal. And then it kind of comes crashing down like a house of cards. That’s what I’ve seen in my life with my clients. And ultimately what you said about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset is what this all boils down to.
So the way that I look at it is something happens in our childhoods normally that causes us to attach to a fixed idea of who we are, but also a fixed idea of what the world is. And that’ll come from our culture. It’ll come from the ideologies that are politically popular in our countries and all these kind of things. And they basically give us a kind of veil that we put between ourselves and true life.
And then as we get older, something, if we’re lucky, will happen where we either wake ourselves up because we just become aware that this is kind of void inside ourselves because we’re not been real, or something kind of tragic might happen where we end up hitting rock bottom. And we see that down there on the foundation of rock bottom that all of these things we were believing are not true. And that’s when we can start to rebuild and reconfigure our relationship with ourselves so that something real can emerge. And normally, in fact, always it’s our real selves because the real version of who we are is just wholeness. That’s how I see it.
And it never goes anywhere. We just spend some time in our lives basically misperceiving who we are and what life is. And so based on what you said about your own story, that’s the journey that you went through. So let’s hone in on this idea of unleashing thyself. So obviously, this is the topic of your podcast. So I’m assuming you’ve learned loads of lessons about this from your own experience. And obviously, from what you’ve heard other people say, what is it about human beings that gets us to this point where the real version of who we are is temporarily kind of leashed behind false ideas, a false identity, and I guess false barriers out there in the world. So maybe we could break it down to internal barriers and external barriers.
Where are these these chains coming from? Basically, do you think based on the conversations?
Constantin: Great question so thank you for asking it. I want to mention one thing before we jump into the internal and external factors for it. When it comes to unleashing thyself, right? And that’s the name of my podcast. That’s what I aim to be doing as well. I see it as a process. It’s not something that I can say I’ve done it and I’m over the finish line now and I’m all happy and done with that.
No, it’s a process. And whenever you realize it in my case, whenever I realize I’m getting closer to whatever the unleashing might look like, I actually realize, wow, there’s so much work to do because there’s more like working on it, right? You keep peeling back and you understand more and more. And I find that’s actually beautiful when you look at the journey, because I see it as if there was a destination, if there was a finish line, and wow, the point of life beyond.
If you could say, okay, I stop learning, I stop growing, and from here on out, they just want to be the same. Well, that kind of sounds boring to me nowadays, right? Yeah. Anyway, so going back to your question, I mean, again, I know myself the best, right? So I always look back at examples in my life. There were a lot of those internal factors, but also external.
And I believe there’s a really close connection between the two. So internal are belief systems that I have developed from external factors, right? So, for example, I remember in my younger years, I wasn’t allowed to show who I was. So be a cheerful boy and play in a certain way because they reflected poorly on, let’s say, my grandparents or the society I grew up in.
So if you look at it like an external factor would be your society, that you are part of culture, people that are raising you, grandparents, parents, caregivers, teachers at school, all of them will have an influence on you. And if you hear something enough times, you start to believe it. And sometimes it’s enough to just hear it once, hey, you’re not good at this, stop doing it, right?
Like in my case, I remember a vivid example where I was told, hey, you know, you shouldn’t be doing art, that’s for poor people or people that don’t want to do something in their life. Right? So that turned into a lesson where like, well, I have to focus on less creative things, more pragmatic stuff like mathematics and sciences where I can have a future.
Right? So those are small things that start to show up in your life. And you take them for granted because I never challenged that. And most of the people I work with and talk to in my professional life or personal life, they’ve been the same. And when it comes to the internal instead of factors, I would argue that pretty much everything starts externally, but then you internalize all of it. Yeah.
Right? You take the lesson from the world, it may be traumatic or otherwise, you incorporate into your life and then becomes part of your routine. And between the ages of zero and seven is when we absorb everything like sponges, right? We don’t necessarily have our conscious mind fully formed yet. So we are from the unconscious.
So we take in everything. So if your parents raised you in a specific way, then you’re going to be repeating a lot of the same things. So if you don’t like something about how your parents have done things or are still doing things, well, it’s up to you to change that.
Right? And it’s not because your parents or caregivers had any bad intentions for you. And sure, some parents are worse than others, but almost everyone I know has had parents that wanted the best for their kids. So once you realize that once you accept the fact that whatever is in your life right now is there, you don’t have a way to go back in the past and change it and just accept that and then move on to the next step, which is build a desire to change it. You can do so many beautiful things and it will appear as if you changed overnight, like you were talking about earlier, early as well. It would feel like that because once you let that house of cards fall down, now you can put new pillars in its place. So the pillars are no longer be built out of cards.
They will be solid, strong pillars and foundational elements that now you can build on top of.
Oli: Yeah, beautiful. You’ve raised so many interesting themes and really important points that are essential for understanding this journey. And I think the most powerful way of breaking this down is looking at the relationship between the ego and the shadow. The way that I always talk about this is that in those first seven years of our lives, like you mentioned, we basically are very trusting and we end up putting our trust in external sources, which is totally normal. But unfortunately, a lot of those external sources are people who have not necessarily woken up to their true self. Their real version of who they are is still locked behind their own self-hypnosis, their own programming. And so as children, we’re putting our trust in unreal sources, basically, which causes us to start to develop an unreal relationship with ourselves.
And this starts the process of the real version of who we are being shackled behind chains or getting leashed up or however we want to say it. And the way that that manifests is it shows up as the ego. The ego, as I see it, is just the false version of who we are that we create to hide from the shame and the guilt.
And in the worst cases, the trauma of being disconnected from ourselves based on all of this external feedback that we’re getting. So in your case, you talked about how people said you shouldn’t be artistic, that’s for poor people. If you were too joyful, then people would kind of shame the joy or whatever it was, they made you feel bad about it or said that it was inappropriate. All of these things that can happen to us just end up causing us to disown certain parts of us that are very real and essential to our happiness and growth towards wholeness. And so that’s when we ultimately end up disowning those parts of ourselves.
And it can be good things and bad things. We can disown our ability to love, our ability to create, our ability to feel joy, blah, blah, blah, as well as the bad things, bad in scare quotes, like our anger or our aggression or whatever it is. All of these things get locked behind this fake version of who we are, which is designed to keep them at bay. But then as we get older, and as we start to wake up and we start to go through the transformational process that you’ve talked about at the start of the show, that’s when we start to bring these things back to the surface.
And the way that I’ve experienced it is that there’ll always be some kind of creative activity or creative vehicle that is going to allow the unconscious to become conscious again, so we can let the house of cards fall down, the house of cards of the ego, as we move towards the process we’ve decided to dedicate ourselves to. And then those foundations, the real foundations that we end up building our life upon, if we’re doing this in the way that you talked about, those pillars, they just are the things that were there all along. It’s the things that we disowned, and now we’re reclaiming our joy, our ability to create things, whatever it is.
Once we get back in touch with those pillars, that’s when this overnight appearing transformation takes place, where we can do something real, and we’re basically doing it on a very, very solid foundation, because what’s real is always real. It never went anyway. We were just misperceiving life because of our conditioning. So that was a huge rant, sorry, but what do you think about all that? And I guess how does it align with your experience?
Maybe could you share some of the pillars that you rediscovered based on your story?
Constantin: Yeah, Oli, I love that. I love what you went with that and your explanation of the ego. I agree with the 100%. The way, I mean, the only thing I would add there as well from my own experience is that if you look at again, how life is being led by most of us, right? From a scientific point of view, we only act from the conscious mind about 5% of the time, which means 95% of the time we are in the subconscious mind.
There was a subconscious mind, that’s your ego, that’s your mind acting on the behavior and all that programming, all those layers you talked about. Then the way I look at it, it’s again, it’s like, let’s say, you know, it’s cold outside, and I have all these layers of me, and I maybe have three sets of pants on, and I have four shirts and a hoodie and a jacket and all that. That’s how I see our true selves being covered as well.
Right? And you talked about the layers of the ego. And it’s about realizing what those layers are, accepting them and then finding a way to remove them, right?
Because it’s hiding who you truly are underneath, right? And when it comes to examples from my life, there are many that we can go down. But for example, one that was really apparent, and I was able to really make it was almost like an overnight shift, was around this idea of needing to belong and being accepted in every single group or every interaction I was part of, right? So I had always this feeling that I had to be part of a group. So if I would, you know, let’s say go to a gathering and I would see, you know, three people talking in a corner, if I wouldn’t be able to interact with them and get into that, you know, group dynamic, I would feel bad for whatever reason. And I could never really explain it.
Right? So with a bit of work, I got to understand that part and got to re-shift and essentially remove that layer. But why I came down to was, again, becoming aware that there was a problem, right? Because I never gave it the second thought most of my life.
And then I’m like, wait a second, it makes me feel bad. It’s not something I agree with. I don’t need to be part of all these groups. Understand that not everyone is going to like me. And that’s fine. I don’t like everyone either, right?
So why would I expect that everyone will like me? So anyway, it starts with the awareness and then realizing that as human beings, for example, we have a need and a desire to belong. And that’s again ingrained in our mind from our earlier times in society, where if you were not part of a group, a tribe, a village, you had the much smaller chance of surviving, right? So you wanted to do everything in your power to be part of a group. But the minority are lying with who you truly are, because some of us will more naturally gravitate and want to be part of many groups. And others will want to be part of groups, but then also want to have their solo time, which is the group I follow under. And then there are some people that just want to be solitary. And that’s fine for them.
Right? And it’s just finding who you are, because what I’ve come to realize in the society doesn’t matter where you grew up. There’s always going to be specific rules you need to follow. There’s always going to be specific lessons and specific ways of doing things. And if you don’t challenge those ways and how they agree with you internally, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of these behaviors we talked about. That are going to hide your true self.
Right? So another big one for me as an example to what we just talked was this idea that I cannot be my authentic self at work, because I would be judged for being joyful, for being optimistic all the time, for being a joker at times, right? Cracking jokes and whatnot.
Right? So my professional, let’s say my professional career has been focused on the professional aspect and I was doing, I am doing really good at it. But what I realized is that when I was able to bridge the gap and bring more of my authentic self to the professional environment, my relationship started to become much better.
The impact of my work has been much higher. Everything has been much better because, surprise, surprise, people connect with people much better when they’re both authentic and the true selves. Or at least one side of the equation is authentic because there’s some unique pull about authenticity and vulnerability that seems to bring people together faster.
Oli: Yeah, 100% because it’s real. And if you’ve got something real going on, you’ve got a foundation of acceptance because the only thing you can do with reality is accept it. And so if you go into an interaction with someone being real, you’re setting the tone for that.
And it basically allows people to feel seen, but it also allows them to step up and be real as well. But I want to ask you about what you just said about the workplace and the ego in general, right? So ultimately, if I’m hearing you right, and I agree with it, what you’re saying is ultimately the ego comes about because it helps us to survive certain situations. So I’m not one of these guys who thinks, you know, we need to kill the ego.
I don’t think you can kill it because it’s unreal. I see the ego is just some idea, misperception that we have picked up that has helped us to survive whatever it is that we’ve been through. So when we were talking about childhood, for example, if somebody has caused us to feel ashamed of our joy, and we want to survive that environment, the thing that we end up doing is creating a version of ourselves and ego version where our joy is basically disowned. And that is a powerful thing because it’s helped us to survive.
The thing is, life keeps changing around us. And if we take that ego into our adult life, and the environment has changed, and we don’t have to hide ourselves anymore, then basically the software is out of date, and it needs to be upgraded. And it’s the same in the workplace as well, like you said, so a lot of cultures, they have certain specific rules about how we’re supposed to be. And so if we want to survive, and then thrive within those cultures that we have chosen to put ourselves in, then in a way, we have to put the mask on that is best suited for that particular environment or that culture.
So the question for you is, how do we go into a corporate environment like Microsoft or wherever it is, know that we’re wearing a mask in order to, you know, rise to the top or whatever it is that we’re trying to do within that culture? How do we do that and stay real at the same time?
Is it possible to wear a mask, whilst also keeping it real? If that makes sense…
Constantin: That’s a good question.
And I’ll answer that really quick and there’s a couple of things I want to add before we go deeper into it, but I would say that there is no right or wrong answer there. I mean, I was very successful with a mask on, so to speak, right? But I found even more success when the mask was lifted. So I would say that yes and no is the answer to the question because it depends on really which version of yourself you bring to that environment and how closely it relates to the real version because most of us have many personalities, right?
And if you think about it, like who I was at work versus who I was with certain friends, who I was with my partner, who I was with my parents, those are all different personalities in a way, right? Because you bring different masks, you bring different layers to those places. And I imagine the goal is not to have just one version of yourself across the board, even though that’s a lofty goal and you’ll be ideal, but to have as few of these masks on as possible because every time we talk in, you know, ideals, let’s say it’s got to be this or nothing else, then that’s when we start failing in achieving anything and also being satisfied with what we achieve because if we have this absolute version of what it has to be perfect or otherwise it’s not good, then you’re never going to be happy, you’re never going to find joy in fulfillment.
So what I’ve come to realize is that what I’m trying to do right now is to be my authentic vulnerable version of Constantin in every interaction I have.
Now sometimes it goes perfect. Some other times it doesn’t because we still have those layers of the ego to work through and you mentioned the death of the ego and I agree with you. I don’t believe it’s about killing the ego.
Even if there was a way to kill it because it’s a part of you, it’s going to put up a fight anyway, but it’s about finding a way to bring the ego along the journey with you and update the software. You mentioned it’s so beautiful and I work in technology, so I always use this analogy. Your mind, your ego works with really old technology. Like in my case, I’m 40 right now.
So let’s say my first 10 years of my life were in the 80s and part of the 90s. There wasn’t even a Windows back then, but let’s say there was a Windows. I might be on Windows 95.
Right now I’m on Windows 11. So there’s a bit of a gap between what I was and what I am. And the beauty of this is that there are different pillars that are working with different technologies.
So your goal should be to try to update that version of the technology. So then when your ego or your mind acts on a subconscious level, which you will 95% of the time anyway, it’s not acting with old beliefs and old rules. It’s acting with the new way of you wanting to work. And sometimes it will take you a few iterations to really get rid of the old and bring in the new.
Oli: Do you think there’s a thing where the new software, the updated software, if it’s going to keep getting iterated so that it’s an improvement in relation to allowing us to be more real, then if this was a real software program, it would become increasingly less complex. So the way that I see it is real versus unreal, fragmentation versus wholeness, essentially boils down to unlearning all of this bullshit that we’ve picked up.
And all of the bullshit that we’ve picked up that is causing us to hold back and hesitate and to be in need of unleashing ourselves in the first place, it’s just unnecessary complexity in the form of beliefs, social rules, questions that maybe don’t even need asking and all these kind of things.
And so if the software gets updated in a real way, it actually becomes more simple rather than complex. Does that make sense?
Constantin: It does. I love the way you explained that. And I would agree because in some cases, not even about updating the software, it’s about removing the new programming and allowing the new programming that you already put in another part of your life to essentially take over there.
So yes, it simplifies it because technically speaking, you are removing, let’s say, chunks of code that no longer serve a purpose. So you’re simplifying the operating machine. Now, for every human being, they might not really matter that much, but if you think about it, it’s not always about adding new things. Yeah, exactly.
It’s about removing some of the learned behaviors and allowing your true self, because I like how you said that our true self has always been there. It’s under all these layers. And I agree with you 100%. I truly believe, and this is funny that I mentioned this, because I have a mathematics degree, right? So I’m coming from the science side, but I believe that us souls, we’re having a human experience, we’re a spiritual being having a human experience, but this is not our only experience. I believe in reincarnation and the fact that we can have multiple lives.
Now, that’s not something that necessarily can be proven scientifically, but once you experience a few things, once you see things, once you do your own research, that’s what I’ve come up with the conclusion. And if that’s the case, if let’s assume that we don’t just have one life, and YOLO and that’s it, we have more than one life, that means that we come into this life with some information.
We come into this life with some information, but then we forget information, so we are not biased in everything that we do, and get to relearn it. And this is what I understand life to be right now. It’s about relearning and allowing the truth. And that’s what I’m showing you to come up, and that’s the idea of remembering, remembering who you are, relearning who you are.
Oli: Yeah. Even if we take reincarnation out of the equation, I think it’s fair to say that we are born with information in us, and the analogy that often gets thrown around is the seeds, and if we allow it to grow, if we nourish it with the right conditions, we’re going to get the oak tree, which is a sense of purpose, and a connection to the universe of God or life or whatever. And the only thing that stops us walking the path that we are supposed to walk in scare quotes is this software that we pick up in our earlier years, which is basically a virus. Like if we go back to that analogy, it’s like basically a load of malware gets installed when we’re younger, and it causes us to be sluggish.
We can’t run at the speed that we need to. We can’t process things properly because we picked up all this emotional stuff like shame and guilt and everything. And so part of the transformational process, if we’re going to keep running with this metaphor that we’ve now brought into the conversation, is allowing some kind of spiritual virus remover, if you want to say it like that, to come and get rid of all the crap that’s weighing us down basically.
And then when we can see clearly, we can put ourselves onto the path that we should have been walking all along, because that is the real path for us. And I think this is a nice segue into another question I wanted to ask you, which is that a lot of the time, when people go through this process of unleashing themselves, what they end up unleashing is totally different to what they expected.
And it’s because when they go into the process, all of the assumptions about what is eventually going to be unleashed are ultimately being filtered through the malware and the programming of the ego. And so when they do unleash the real version of who they are, they’ll actually learn that the path they now need to go on is actually going to be a huge learning experience.
It’s going to be uncomfortable because it’s going to be asking them to do things that they’ve hidden for a long time. It’s going to involve going off into the great unknown and all these kind of things. And so they end up in a place where they’re not forcing life through what they thought they understood at the start of the journey, which was all ego stuff anyway, but that they’re going onto a journey of growth basically. So it’s letting go of the fixed mindset to use the language used earlier and going on this journey of growth, which is also aligned with whatever information was in them right at the start, which they forgot about. So the question is twofold, I guess. First of all, is that how you see it?
And secondly, once the true self or the real self emerges, and we can finally see it because we’ve unleashed it, how do we prepare ourselves to go down this path where we’re going to have to stretch, we’re going to have to get out of our comfort zones, and we’re going to have to do things that we maybe didn’t think we had to do or that we were ready for?
Constantin: Yeah, such a great question there, Oli. Well, first of all, yes, I do agree with your take there.
I can see it as, let’s say, a virus or a malware as you so nicely put. But I also see it as, let’s say, a beginner’s mistake in a way. So I’ve been a coder in school and in some of my jobs I did, right? And what I didn’t have enough experience or I didn’t have enough knowledge. My code was clunky.
My code had a lot of extra things in it that weren’t necessary. And what does that mean? That usually means that it’s taking up more computing power. It’s taking up more space. It’s taking up more resources. And it’s also, perhaps, like you said, it’s not taking you to the right result because of its clunkiness and you’re not using the right information. But as you become a better developer, let’s say, if you develop code and you start learning more, you learn less practices and you start talking to other people, you start to refine your code. So now it becomes more efficient to remove some of the clunkiness.
So I would say it’s a mix of the viruses, like you said, right? Because those are the things that are meant to destroy the system in a way that are meant to bring you down. And then also the clunkiness of the fact that, let’s say, your parents were on a journey of transformation themselves, but they weren’t very far along because of society, because of the culture, the time when they were born, right? I mean, when my parents were born in the 50s, right? Life was much harder. It wasn’t as straightforward as it is, especially in some parts of the world, more than others, right? Coming after the World War II and recovery and all that stuff, right?
So they could have been on a path, but maybe they only got 10% of the way there or 20%. So you pick up some of the good things, but then you also pick up a lot of the clunkiness that comes with that. And we’ll say the viruses that were imprinted on them through society.
And then of course, your own viruses you pick up from society, culture, whatever. So I would say it’s a mix of those things, those elements that will bring you to a point in time when you, you know, your life, most of it is run by whatever you thought was real, whatever you thought you should have done, right?
Oli: Yeah. There’s an element as well where we can take this analogy a little bit deeper. So as you, you know, you’re talking about code and everything, it made me realize that ultimately, you know, what we’ve been saying, why I always end up saying is this journey of transformation that we’re all on is about fragmentation versus wholeness. And when we’re most, most real, and like you said, we can always go deeper into it.
It’s like an onion. But when we’re most, most real, we’re ultimately moving with wholeness towards more wholeness, which is a deeper sense of connection to truth or God’s life, whatever you want to call it, right? When we’re talking about code, code is ultimately an algorithmic way of seeing things, isn’t it?
And so, so it’s fragmented. And so actually part of this journey of revealing our real self of unleashing it is stepping beyond all of the code, even if it’s just for a little moment. And this is something that I’ve experienced in my life, like quite a few times now, and I’ve spoken to other people about it. Abraham Maslow called it a peak experience, and it can ultimately be anything, but there are moments in your life where your ego will basically dissolve and you feel connected to everything around you.
Maybe, you know, it could be something simple. You might be hiking out there in nature and objects and subjects become one. You’re part of the system as a whole. And you experience, you know, what they call samadhi and like the panichads and stuff like that or enlightenment. Maybe enlightenment is a strong word, but you have these moments where you’re totally connected and in those moments, your ego is dissolved and you’re just in the flow of life. And that is your real identity. And because that real identity is beyond any concept or any coding or any programming, it actually shows you that all of the programs basically are unreal.
And if you just taste that for a minute, it can help you to stay on the right path, even when, you know, you’re in the world and like the masks are telling you to do certain things or you feel like you’ve been prompted by the code and you’re reacting to certain things or whatever it is, you just need to taste those moments beyond any software programming for just a few minutes, a few seconds even.
And then whenever life gets too much, or you just get caught up in the hamster wheel of going through the motions, you know which direction to return in. So I guess the question there is, have you experienced any of those peak experiences? And how do they feed into all this stuff that we’re saying about, you know, the codes and the programming as you see it and the revelation of the real self?
Constantin: Yeah. Oh, I love that. So if we go back to when I started sharing my journey, right, and I mentioned that my, you know, let’s say my true transformation journey started six years ago by the really elevated last year, well, that’s when I had one of those first few moments that you mentioned. And mine was, well, was overall 12 day retreat.
I would say my first one or my first ones, right? And this was in Ecuador, I went there for a mental health retreat for like three weeks. And I got to be in the Andes mountains, right by the Amazonian jungle, beautiful there. Anyway, so just being in nature there with nothing and with like many people was enough to get me to start feeling things that I never felt before and exactly the experiences you were describing. But then to take it a step further, what I did for the first time in my life is allow myself to lose control through plant medicine, right?
And someone that’s never been drunk, never done drugs, never had any desire to do any of those, not for religious reasons or anything, just personal reasons. And, but I felt intrigued about plant medicine and something that so many cultures have been exploring and connected to the world with for thousands of years. And through plant medicines is how I had, let’s say my first real, real connection to everything, to people to nature, to the dogs, to everything. And then after that, so this is, you know, April of 2022, a year and a half ago now, I was able to have similar experiences without the help of any psychedelics or anything like that. But through meditation, through hypnotherapy, hypnosis, that’s something I never thought I would say out loud that I’ve done hypnotherapy. Oh my God, it’s been amazing.
Right? It’s just gives you that connection and realization that everything is so insignificant, because in the next few more things, like time is infinite, let’s say, everything is so insignificant, but yet at the same time, it is most significant thing that can happen. Because it’s you right now, it’s you in this moment. And that’s all you have, right? That’s when I, when I say with that, and I realize, wait a second, so even though to me, these fields are significant as they should be, because it is, it’s also the same time is significant, because you know, 1000 years from now, nobody’s going to care about the only and constant in conversation, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever we did in the world, right? Very, very few people will get to say that. So yes, I would say that once you get the point in your transformation where you can have those moments.
And now I have them in nature, as I mentioned, meditation at home or in a quiet space in nature, you start to realize your true self, like you said, and always look for, for more of that, like always look for, how can I bring more of that into my life and allow it to guide my life?
Oli: Yeah, wow. So many things that I could just pick two pieces and I agree with it all 100 million percent. I think when I’m working with my clients, something that I always end up talking about is this idea of creative tension. And basically, creative tension is just a way of designing that feeling into your life as much as possible. Like I truly believe that you can be high on life to a very frequent degree, basically, if you live in the right way, and living in the right way means that you’re constantly stretching yourself so that you’re living just beyond what your ego is telling you. And the way that you do that, the short version is you create a real vision for yourself, and you’re constantly keeping that vision in mind as you navigate the waves of what is happening in current day reality.
And if you do that, and you’ve designed a vision that is aligned with the highest expression of what you currently know about your real self based on those moments where you’ve tasted it, then ultimately from day to day, you’re constantly a few steps in front of your ego. And you’re working with this process that we’ve kind of alluded to throughout the conversation of moving through uncertainty from fragmentation to wholeness or peeling more and more layers of that onion and growing more real in the process. And the thing that you said that is super relevant to that is it’s ultimately about the loss of control. All of these things that we’ve said about algorithms and programs and limiting beliefs and the ego and social control and blah blah, all these different things, fragmentation, our attachment to all of those things is about the need to survive and the illusion of control. And as soon as we can let go of that control, and we can experience something real in the way that you just shared from your own life, we basically let go of all of these illusory, unreal control systems we put in place. And that just puts us back on the path that is always always there beneath the surface of wholeness, taking us deeper into wholeness. And if we can lose control or let go of control and trust that process, it will always lead us where we want to go.
And that is the theme I’ve just seen in my own life so many times and I’ve so many people have shared that with me now, it always comes back to that, letting go of whatever it is we’ve created to try and control life and then trusting life to take us where we need to go. And we could probably talk about that for another six hours, I think you need to come back on this podcast sometime because we basically run out of time. But how would you sum up this whole conversation like based on everything I’ve just rambled about and everything you’ve shared, the amazing insights you’ve shared with everyone today, how would you sum up this conversation and what are some practical things that people can do to start living in this way?
And also can you tell people where they can find you, what’s your website, where can they listen to your podcast?
Constantin: Yeah, absolutely, well thank you. And you’re right, we can be talking about us so much and the idea of letting go of control and trusting more has been a huge struggle for me and it still is to some degree and I’m still learning every day to do better and better in that aspect because that was really a big part of my behaviors that were reinforced and got stronger and stronger over the years. So we’ll talk about it at a different time but definitely still a massive work in progress but I see glimpses of it when I let go of control and I trust the process, trust the universe, beautiful things happen, it will put people in your path, you’ll put opportunities in your path, things you never thought possible.
Yeah, yeah, that’s a fact. Right and I’ll tell people where they can find and then we’ll summarize everything together here but you can, if you want to connect with me personally, best place to reach me is either through LinkedIn, Konstantin, Bo Morun or Konstantin at UnleashedIself.com. UnleashedIself.com is where you can go and find more about the podcast, you can find the podcast on Unleashed Iself of course on YouTube at Unleashed Iself or all the major social media platforms. I post content, daily on Instagram, TikTok and others, aim to again inspire and empower you on this journey.
So it’s either clips of conversations with amazing people like Oli or solo conversations, things that are meant to again be inspirational and empowering to you are lessons from my life, lessons of anything that reflections, let’s say, anything that I’ve gone through because I’ve come to realize and I think this sums up part of what we talked about and what I think people should come to realize is that when you are authentic, when you are vulnerable, you get to connect more with people but you also get to help people a lot more because one thing I’ve learned the hard way in a way and I say or I’ve learned later in my life is that whatever challenges you are going through, you are not alone.
There are many people that are struggling with which means that any challenges you were going through in the past but then overcame, that means that people are struggling with that right now at this moment but you’ve beaten that and you’ve gone on the other side which means that you can help people that are struggling with something you struggled with at this moment and when I had the realization is like wow, I couldn’t believe I haven’t really gave it that much thought and I always thought my problems are my own and no one else has to go to them or has gone through them and they have their own version but once you realize that you will allow your transformation to happen even faster because you can do two things now not only spend time on improving yourself which is what we’ve been talking about but also start giving back and by giving back, by sharing it with people even on a podcast like this and one-on-one conversations, one-to-many or social media, you learn in the process even more. So it’s a beautiful exchange where you’re giving but you’re getting so much more yourself.
Oli: Yeah, 100%. I think that as you go through this process of letting go of the ego stuff that we were talking about, you basically reveal gifts that were there all along and the only way that you can benefit from those gifts and use those gifts is to serve other people basically and that’s the transformation that takes place. Like at the start of these transformational journeys I found people think okay I need to improve myself so that I can basically get what I want from life. That’s the ultimate motivation at the start for most people.
They’re not happy with their lives, they know they need to do something but they’re still filtering it through the ego and then as they go through this process and the ego kind of slips away or it has less control over them, they realize that it’s not about trying to bless their own plans but just blessing what is unfolding anyway through the way that they’re being in the world and I think when you do that, that’s when you can be in that place of creative tension I was talking about because you’re always a few steps ahead of your ego and you’re helping other people to do that as well in some way shape or form whether it’s you creating something or just the conversations you’re having and all that kind of stuff. So I’m going to stop talking but this ultimately is reminding me that it’s all about trust. I’ve said this so many times on the podcast, it always comes down to trust.
You get that point of acceptance of what’s real and then all you can do is trust it and go with it and this is just a really amazing reminder for me that that’s foundational basically. So Constantin, thank you so much for this whole conversation and for the other conversation we had before and just really appreciate your time so thank you so much like honestly.
Constantin: And thank you all as well, much appreciate it. I love the questions and the conversation as well and thank you to the audience for sticking with us.
Oli: Thanks again, man.
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